Travis Kelce Responds to Alma Mater's Reaction to Taylor Swift Engagement

Travis Kelce’s alma mater is hopeful that the NFL star’s engagement to Taylor Swift will make her a Cincinnati Bearcats fan.

The official Instagram account for the University of Cincinnati’s football team posted a photo of a fan holding up a sign that read, “Taylor Swift Dates Bearcats” on Tuesday, August 26.

“He’s gonna need a new sign 💍,” the caption read. Cincinnati also edited the word “dates” to “marries” onto the poster in a follow-up slide, following the Kansas City Chiefs tight end’s proposal to the pop star.

Kelce, 35, was quick to notice the upload, writing in the comments section, “😂😂😂.”

Kelce, who played football at and graduated from the University of Cincinnati before joining the Kansas City Chiefs, revealed hours earlier that he recently proposed to 35-year-old Swift.

“Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married 🧨,” Swift and Kelce captioned a joint Instagram carousel, featuring photos from the pair’s proposal moment.

In the dreamy snaps, Kelce got down on one knee in a rose-filled private garden and slipped a diamond from Kindred Lubeck at Artifex Fine Jewelry on Swift’s left ring finger.

Swift and Kelce have been together for two years following a missed connection at her Eras Tour concert in Kansas City in July 2023. While attending the performance, Kelce hoped to score a private meet-and-greet to exchange numbers with Swift. His request went unanswered, and he lamented the apparent rejection on his “New Heights” podcast.

“This all started when Travis very adorably put me on blast on his podcast, which I thought was metal as hell,” Swift recalled to TIME magazine in December 2023. “We started hanging out right after that. So we actually had a significant amount of time that no one knew, which I’m grateful for, because we got to get to know each other.”

While speaking further about the moment on an episode of “New Heights” earlier this month, Swift gushed about Kelce’s romantic gesture.

“This was more, like, I was in an ’80s John Hughes movie and he was just standing outside of my window with a boombox just being like, ‘I want to date you! Do you want to date me!?’” she said. “So I was like, ‘If this guy isn’t crazy, which is a big if, this is sort of what I’ve been writing songs about what I’ve been wanting to happen to me since I was a teenager.’”

After a few months of privately dating, Swift and Kelce made their public debut at one of his Chiefs games in September 2023.